The invention relates to a static bearing, more particularly a static gas bearing, with a component to be journalled, which is movable with respect to a fixedly arranged bearing part, which bearing part is provided with one or more openings for the supply of a bearing medium.
Bearings of the kind described above are well known in the technique and are also designated as full film bearings. A feature of these bearings is that in operation the surfaces of the component to be journalled and of the bearing part are constantly separated from each other by a layer of bearing medium in the gap between these surfaces. A problem in this kind of bearings is their comparatively low rigidity, i.e. the ratio between the variation of the dimension of the bearing gap and the variation of the load. With increasing load, the bearing gap dimension is reduced, which is very disadvantageous especially in precision machines.
A construction to improve the rigidity of this kind of bearings is described in DE-A-2544872. In this case, the bearing bush is provided with conically extending bearing parts, whose conicity is adapted to the pressure prevailing in the bearing gap.
A disadvantage of these known bearings with variable conicity is that they are sensitive to pneumatic instability ("pneumatic hammer") and are fairly complicated from a constructional viewpoint. A further disadvantage of these bearings is that they have a high consumption of bearing medium with low load.
It is further known from U.S. Pat. No. 3,442,560 for hydraulic full film bearings to increase the rigidity by causing the pressure in the bearing gap to control the passage of the supply for bearing medium. In these known bearings, the volume of the supply lead for the bearing medium is fairly large, which is not acceptable in particular for gas bearings in connection with the instability (pneumatic hammer).
Increase of rigidity by means of elastic supply openings, the passage diameter of the supply openings varying with pressure variation, is further known from ASME Transactions 9, 311-317, 1966.